When I saw Dear Evan Hansen in 2017 on Broadway, it blew me away.
When I saw Dear Evan Hansen in 2017 on Broadway, it blew me away. It dealt head-on with the challenges of being a teenager in America — challenges that have gotten only more profound in the years since. Now it’s a movie and the themes are still remarkably prescient: bullying, social media, the human need for connection and acceptance. While watching the movie, I thought to myself more than once, “Thank God I grew up in the 70s.” Coming to the big screen on September 24, Dear Evan Hansen transported me to those fraught teenage years all over again.
If you haven’t seen the show or heard the music, Dear Evan Hansen started as a stage musical, with music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, and book by Steven Levenson, about an anxious, isolated, depressed high school student longing to…well…belong. Stephen Chbosky, who wrote and directed The Perks of Being A Wallflower — another story of adolescent angst — directed the film.
When a fellow loner classmate Connor commits suicide, Evan, who only really interacted with Connor right before his death, finds himself weaving a web of lies about their “friendship.” But for the first time, he feels like he belongs.
According to Levenson, “this story explores ugly feelings that we have, how alone we would have to feel that we actually lie to become part of something terrible just to feel less alone.”
Entering the world of a story rife with grief, denial, and self-hatred is a heavy lift, especially for Ben Platt, who had left the role for three years before becoming Evan again for the film. But this time, Platt (and everyone involved in the movie) have had to steel themselves for some of the knife-wielding critics. This is not a movie for cynics. It’s sincere, and because it’s a musical, sometimes a bit corny (confession: I LOVE musicals!) but it’s so relevant to what too many young people are feeling today, especially in the wake of a global pandemic: lost, alone, less-than.
I was honored to interview some of the cast and creators. Platt is a singular talent, but there have been many reviews bemoaning the fact that at 27, he’s simply too old to play Evan. I was prepared to agree with that assessment, but after seeing it, I wholeheartedly disagree. (Remember The Breakfast Club? Judd Nelson was 25 and no one seemed to bitch about that!) I asked Ben how he was handling the criticism.
“My partner Noah helps me to tune out all those horrible things that people say because there’s just nothing for me to gain from them. I know [the show] changes people’s lives.” He referenced a note he kept from his run in the Broadway production — “one of, many, many notes I received of the same nature. This one is anonymous and all it says is, ‘Because I saw the show, I didn’t let go.’ So for me, that’s it.”
Here’s the rest of my conversation with Ben, Steven and Stephen, Julianne Moore (who I adore), Amandla Stenberg (who is on her way to becoming a big star, IMO), and Nik Dodani (who I did a brief scene with in the retooled Murphy Brown!) Enjoy!
Katie Couric: Ben, what were some of the challenges you faced in turning this story into a movie?
Ben Platt: Apart from the initial challenges of just reentering the material — launching back into a space filled with a lot of anxiety, self-hatred, and depression and things that aren’t that fun to live in — the challenge was trying to maintain all the emotional intensity of Evan from the stage. To understand and love him, but without over-broadcasting or playing for the back of the house. Being a bit more internal, more demodulated, closer to the ground, and knowing that that doesn’t indicate a lack of intensity. It’s just a different medium.
KC: Was it hard to become Evan again? When was your last Broadway performance?
BP: November of 2017. So it was a little less than three years before we shot it. It was very easy in some regards — I’ve never gone into a movie so prepared: I knew the songs! But it was challenging to return and want it to carry as much weight as it did but in a medium that isn’t necessarily my home base. I grew up doing theater. And this was a very new and spontaneous and scarier experience, but I was surrounded by really talented people, both new and familiar with the first process. And I think it was a nice combination.
KC: I read that you had help from Stephen Chbosky preparing for the emotional burden of being in Evan’s headspace.
BP: I’m very grateful that Stephen Chbosky asked me what I needed to make the performance happen. Particularly on the days that were more emotionally taxing and more difficult, like filming “Words Fail.” For the section in the dining room where I’m admitting what I’ve done, Stephen asked me a week or so before filming it, “What is that day gonna look like for you? What can I do to help you?” And I asked something that is not necessarily a thing that any director would be on board with, which was, “Can we please start with my coverage, my close coverage right away in the morning? Can I just go and start and just drop into it and not have to establish the why, not set up blocking, not let the other actors find their performance first?” A lot of really selfish needs, essentially. But I really wanted to rip the Band-Aid off and do it. And Steven protected me and allowed me to do that and made the accommodations necessary with timing, logistics, and all of that.
I also remember my costars’ generosity. Danny Pino, Amy Adams, and Kaitlyn Dever had to receive this climactic information of the lie on camera for like five hours before they got to do it for their performances. But they lived so fully and so devastatingly real in every single take of mine, way before they were going to do their performances. And I was just really bowled over by the generosity and their willingness to put themselves through that reality over and over again.
KC: Stephen C., you wrote the book and then directed The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which is similarly about a teenage boy with mental health struggles. Did this just feel like a natural next step for you?
Stephen Chbosky: I published my book 22 years ago and over the years I’ve received boxes and boxes of letters from kids who needed it or who were helped by the story. There’s one in particular that sticks out in my mind. It said, “I had a stack of letters written to all the people close to me in my life. And they’re still there because I was going to kill myself and I read your book and I didn’t.” So when I saw Dear Evan Hansen three years ago, I saw an opportunity. Because in a lot of places, kids are never going to get the show. Even if they could afford it, they don’t have access to it. So I saw in this show a beautiful opportunity to take Steven’s wonderful script, this great performance, these wonderful songs, and really change — and in some cases hopefully save — some lives that deserve to be understood. I think that’s what this show does. It’s also for their parents, who are so desperate to understand what they’re going through. And little did we know when we were starting this, a pandemic would happen that would have such unbelievable emotional ramifications for everybody.
KC: Julianne, as a mother of recent teens, what was it like playing a mom watching her son struggle from the sidelines?
Julianne Moore: I saw the show on Broadway shortly after it opened, and I was just blown away by it and by Ben’s original, alive, and electric performance. Here was this thing that spoke so much to my children at the time about the adolescent experience — how you have to be out in the world, trying to find yourself before you know who you are, and that kind of gap between what you think you should be and who you are and not feeling seen or known. As a parent watching this experience, you just try to be around the edge to be witness to it, to try to help the transition. And here’s this single mom, who’s not always available because she’s trying to work and provide. And she has a kid who’s not neurotypical and has mental-health issues. And so it’s very fraught and it’s really loaded, but I thought it was so beautiful.
KC: Amandla, I think it was so telling and appropriate for your character to have to be very different on the inside than on the outside. I have two daughters myself — I know about this desire to be outwardly perfect, but this inner turmoil that young women feel. I’m curious if you’ve known a lot of girls like that.
Amandla Stenberg: Yeah. What’s so incredible about being able to play this character is being able to present mental-health struggles through a girl. So often the way that girls deal with mental health is by over-performing or overachieving. A lot of what I contributed to the character were my own experiences in high school and being so afraid of the mental-health struggles that I was dealing with and needing a lot of external validation from my teachers, my peers, and my family. I also used extracurriculars to keep myself busy all the time, like Alana, and as a way to try to connect with people in a way that wasn’t actually natural. But I love that she’s so passionate, so tormented by everybody’s pain and she feels so deeply compelled to try to make people feel more comfortable being vulnerable. I guess I really care about that, too.
KC: And Nik, I know this version of the role was really tailored for you. In the play, the character is quite different. What did it mean to you to make the character much more a reflection of you?
Nik Dodani: I really wanted to honor the role and do justice to it but also bring myself to it. We had so many conversations to figure out exactly who this guy was. Because in the film he’s an openly gay brown kid in 2021. During my first phone call with Stephen Chbosky, he mentioned that he saw my standup on Colbert. He was like, “Your audition was great. We loved it. And then I watched your standup and you said you were gay. And I was like, ‘Whoa, I like this guy even more.’” He was like, “Do you want to make Jared gay?” And I was like, “I think so, yeah, that sounds great.” I was given the freedom to bring a lot of myself to it.
KC: Why do you think this movie is generating such strong feelings, both positive and negative, and how are you processing that?
Steven Levenson: It goes back to the original conception of the musical. The germ of this idea came from Benj, one of the songwriters. In high school, he had a classmate who died of a drug overdose tragically. And it was someone who no one was friends with, an outcast. In the wake of his death, Benj watched as everyone in the school started to suddenly become the deceased kid’s best friend. Stories started coming out like, “Actually, our lockers were really close.” Everybody seemed to want to be part of this tragedy. Benj himself felt that urge, but was conscious enough to know that there was something wrong about that. The question was why? I think that’s an ugly feeling, but one I think we all have. And I think this movie explores those ugly feelings — how alone we might feel that we might actually lie to become part of something terrible. It’s not that I like Evan for what he does. But when I look at a character like Evan, and I see him sitting in that dining room with the Murphy family and their grief, I understand why he does what he does. I’m a human being, Evan’s a human being. And that to me is the point of storytelling.
BP: Everyone is looking for something to hate right now, everyone is bored and upset and outraged and tired and frustrated. And I understand that — we’re going through a horrible time. So I get it. But I think people people who want to hate are going to hate it, and people that want to love it and find beauty in it are going to do that.
